At least since René Descartes declared dogs to be no more feeling than machines, and doubled down on his thesis by nailing and burning some of the unlucky automatons alive, people objecting to the misuse of animals have mostly inhabited the losing side. Granted, epic figures have spoken eloquently on the subject: Pythagoras, Saint Francis of Assisi, Leo Tolstoy, William Wilberforce, Mahatma Gandhi. Much of the time, though, run-of-the-mill defenders of animal welfare have ended up with the short straw. Mocked for “sentimentality,” faulted for illicit “anthropomorphizing,” dismissed for engaging in “moral equivalence,” the diverse animal-welfare band has grown accustomed to what Richard John Neuhaus once quipped to pro-lifers: “lose a few, lose a few.”

Even so, the seeming triumph of the notion that “dominion” entitles human beings to do whatever we like to our fellow creatures may yet prove Pyrrhic. If it does, the reason will be science. The explosion of research just since the turn of this century about the fascinating inner workings of animals reveals them to be more like us than has ever been established before. As a result, the disjuncture between what we now know about animals and what we still do to them amounts to a signature and stark moral anomaly.

Consider just a fraction of what we now know. Elephants bury their dead (and sometimes the dead of others), cry when reunited with family after years apart, and stay within yards of their mothers for the first eight years of life; they have also been observed protecting human beings and holding grudges against malefactors. When elephants are traumatized by seeing their family members shot, or upon being taken into captivity, their brain waves show patterns like those of humans diagnosed with PTSD. Pigs — as anyone acquainted with a regular farm will know — are very much like dogs in their trainability, or what we call “intelligence.” They can learn their names, perform tricks, recognize themselves in mirrors, play video games; and like other mammals, though even more dramatically than most, they resist their deaths in slaughterhouses with preternatural, loudly expressed terror — as anyone who’s been to one will also know.

Dolphins, like elephants, have been found to avoid humans who act in ways that the animals find threatening and to warm up to those who don’t; some have protected and rescued humans from sharks; like elephants and chimpanzees, they can recognize themselves in a mirror. Even the less cuddly species behave in ways more akin to our own than has been guessed. Tagging devices on various types of sharks suggest, to the surprise of researchers, a social organization more akin to mammals than to fish. Similarly, and contrary to legend, wolves — like other animals — do not lope around like social isolates; the wolf pack is centered on a mated pair and their offspring, i.e., it is an extended animal family whose members play together into old age, tend to the sick among them, and coordinate discriminating attacks on individual prey with complex communications until recently unknown to us.

These and other leaps in understanding the interior world of nonhuman animals were unthinkable before modern instruments revealed them — a panoply including MRIs, increasingly sensitive acoustic and other tags, sophisticated video surveillance, and more. To repeat: Contemporary animal science is radically transforming our understanding of nonhuman animals. And here is where things that ought to be connected come apart. The same extraordinary leap in human knowledge about fellow creatures has yet to be matched by a commensurate moral leap that would transform some of our practices toward them.

So, for example, elephants in Asia and Africa continue to be marched to the precipice of extinction — whether because criminal bands including the Somali wing of al-Qaeda finance themselves with ivory, or for the sheer frisson enjoyed by men who kill for fun. Wolves, polar bears, lions, elephants, and other “trophy animals” continue to be wiped from the earth in numbers and proportions not seen since the several-hundred-year Roman bloodbath in the Colosseum. And despite incremental progress on behalf of factory-farm animals, notably pigs, most pork continues to be carved from creatures who spend their lives “immobilized for all of their existence, lying and living in their own urine and excrement, . . . sick, sore, atrophied, usually lame, crazed or broken in spirit, and kept alive in these torments only by a massive and reckless use of steroids.”

That description is one of many unflinchingly offered by Matthew Scully in his new book, Fear Factories: Arguments about Innocent Creatures and Merciless People. A pro-life vegan and former speechwriter for President George W. Bush and others, Scully is also author of the landmark 2003 volume Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy — a book that, like Peter Singer’s very different Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for our Treatment of Animals a generation before it (1975), has had a marked effect on readers, especially younger readers.

Two decades later, Scully enlarges his defense of the defenseless with a collection of pieces traversing the question of animal treatment around the globe — from an animal-safari convention in Las Vegas to the bloody waters of the Pacific, where industrial trawling kills creatures of sea and air indiscriminately to ice floes where seals are clubbed within days of birth, to factory farms and other untouristed sites. In all, the book offers a welcome opportunity to take a new look at the moral argument that Scully, followed and accompanied by others, continues to put forward.

Like Dominion before it, Fear Factories will make some readers think as they may never have thought before. And for those already anxious to turn the page, rest assured that the book also offers relief. Scully is an exquisite writer, which is to say, thinker. Readers who fear a pitiless hectoring will be relieved to find instead an extended literary discussion, including invocations of Christian teaching and appeals to plenty of in-house favorites such as C. S. Lewis, Malcolm Muggeridge, and E. B. White; assorted celebrities; the last three popes; and National Review editors, including Kathryn Jean Lopez, Rich Lowry, and Ramesh Ponnuru. (As Scully notes, half of the chapters in the book appeared first as pieces in NR or on NRO.) In other good news, at least for those who take their humor dark, there are flashes of wicked wit as the author exposes what the laissez-faire approach to animal welfare has wrought.

Begin with the book’s immolation of cant. In industry talk, mink (like other species) are not clubbed or gassed to death, but “harvested.” They spend their lives not in boxes so small that a hamster might object, but rather on “ranches.” Their carcasses are not ground to bits and fed to other animals in concentrations never found in nature, but instead “rendered into feed for other animals, . . . completing nature’s natural scheme of recycling.” And when they die, it is through the “introduction of unconsciousness,” far easier to imagine than “anal electrocution.”

According to the author, 355,000 pigs “are trucked off per day in the life of America.” The typical factory-raised sow never sees the sun. She lies penned on concrete, unable even to turn around, biting her cages and often herself, jacked up freakishly with hormones and antibiotics, and otherwise treated in ways that would, and do, send the dog-abusers among us straight to cages of their own. The earlier euphemism for this disordered treatment, “gestation crates,” having taken on something of a negative connotation, has lately been replaced with the softer “maternity pens.” Notes Scully of the rhetorical upgrade, “It can’t be too long before the toxic lagoons of manure outside these places are said to offer ‘lake views,’ and slaughterhouses are called ‘the activity center.’”

A quick look around the globe proves that Descartes is not alone. “Bycatch,” invoked as cover for the dolphins, whales, seals, birds, and other animals that make up the collateral damage of sea-“farming,” is another obfuscation. Fear Factories also relays the plight of captured animals across Asia, where dogs, dolphins, whales, sharks are sliced and diced alive with a zest that might have appalled the Marquis de Sade. In the United States, some 60,000 dogs are killed in animal experiments annually, in labs showered with government money. If there are sound utilitarian reasons for this sacrifice — especially in a nation where dogs now replace children as the companions of choice — they have not been forthcoming. Typically, those lab canines are also “de-barked,” meaning their vocal cords are cut — supposedly to “reduce their anxiety,” though the practice seems more designed to reduce the anxiety of their handlers.

Euphemism being contagious, it is not only the immediate financial beneficiaries of animal exploitation who habituate themselves to it. One critic of Scully’s speaks of animals’ enduring “mere pain” — a phrase that “carries the distinctive whiff of the behaviorist laboratory,” as he notes. Another defends the practice of elephants’ being “taken in the parks,” four words rather than the single one “killed.” “Culling” is another evasion. Some 90 percent of the African elephants have been vanquished in the past century; does imperious nature really mandate killing more?

Yet Fear Factories, for all its castigation, ventures a merciful conjecture that rings true: Surely many people who do this kind of work have been taken in by euphemism, too, hoodwinked by the same untruths and half-truths.

Is the systematic resort to deceptive language beginning to sound familiar? It should, especially to readers of National Review. Euphemism is also the stock-in-trade of the abortionist — and the pornographer, and the trafficker, and others whose work is best done, and least susceptible to interruption, in the dark.

The question of animal welfare can’t be reduced to politics. It isn’t, or shouldn’t be, “owned” by any faction. People who think we can do better by animals can be found across spectrums, cultures, and continents.

Consider the American Catholic theologian Charles Camosy, who in his 2013 book, For Love of Animals: Christian Ethics, Consistent Action, summarizes centuries of religious thinking on the relationship between critters and the rest of us. (Its introduction, which I contributed, was published on NRO.) A moral traditionalist who is often cast as a man of the Left for his other writings, Camosy defies easy categorization. Or consider some of the souls mentioned in Fear Factories — the chef in Chicago who took foie gras off his menu after seeing geese force-fed; the people in Africa, and elsewhere, moved by the plight of wounded and otherwise traumatized animals, doing their best to help; the documentarians who capture the magnificence of animal life on land and sea.

Mercy may sometimes require politics, but it isn’t intrinsically political. At the same time, animal welfare remains an issue to which conservatives, above all, should give heightened scrutiny, for several reasons.

One is that attending to real questions about real, living creatures is an act of real stewardship; it is what, from a Judeo-Christian perspective, human beings are called to do. Such consideration could not be further removed from the performative “activism” that now passes elsewhere for concern about planet Earth. “Somewhere along the way,” Scully notes, “our modern environmental movement took on an impersonal, abstract mindset, more about ‘habitat’ than animals.” It amounts to “cheap nature worship.” Witness, including conservative witness, to the importance of animal welfare puts living creatures ahead of abstractions or things. It’s an exercise in moral realism, not impotent virtue-signaling.

Second, for pro-lifers especially, the family resemblance between defenseless human animals and defenseless other animals has become unavoidable. As I have argued both in these pages and elsewhere, pro-lifers and pro-animal-lifers are more aligned than either movement seems to understand. They are bound by their implicit — sometimes explicit — appeal to natural law. Nor does this similarity imply moral equivalence between human beings and nonhuman animals, as critics sometimes charge. “Though the moral stakes are not the same as with abortion,” Scully explains, “the moral habits are, relying in both cases on the averted gaze and a smothering of empathy.” What does it tell us that Big Abortion and Big Farm share the same terror of cameras in their midst, and visit the same prosecutorial vengeance on anyone who documents what happens in windowless rooms?

Movements on behalf of animals and the movement on behalf of unborn humans share another critical trait: altruism. As P. J. O’Rourke once commented, the annual March for Life is the only demonstration in Washington that doesn’t stand to benefit those who take part. The late, great humorist’s moral insight applies to those who look to animal protection, too.

Third, it’s time to bury for good another objection lobbed at people who raise a hand about animal mistreatment. That’s the retort that choice is the highest good. “Don’t want a hamburger? Don’t eat one,” goes the thinking — as if, contrary to law and nature, food and food alone were immune to ethical inspection. Religions across the board wrap rules around what’s on the table. So do doctors, nutritionists, chefs, and moms. Another variation on this theme, also heard often, is that human beings are designed, or primed by evolution, to eat animal flesh and therefore should. The first observation is true; the second makes the slogan a non sequitur. After all, we’re also splendidly suited to enacting every one of the deadly sins, but no one seems to derive “oughts” from that “is.”

Finally, to dispose of another misconception of which some readers are understandably wary: Protecting animals does not require buying into the academic quagmire of “animal rights.” Yes, Peter Singer’s utilitarian, rights-based approach in Animal Liberation almost 50 years ago first teed up the subject as no other single book did. True, academia abounds with similar talk of “animal rights,” including in journals in which feminist theorists compare women to meat, rape to slaughter, and otherwise engage in decadent curiosities.

But these are not the arguments for animal welfare that have momentum these days in individual legislatures and courts, including the court of opinion. “Do the calves [used for veal] have a right to be spared their miseries?” Scully asks in an interview with Kathryn Jean Lopez on NRO. “It is enough to know that we have a duty to be lenient, granting even these creatures the little mercies that only human beings can bring into the world.”

The strongest argument for erring on the side of mercy toward other creatures is that our unique power in and of itself makes the case for it. This is especially true today, as other species are more vulnerable to our own than ever before.

A new and potent fact has been introduced into Creation: There’s no such thing as a fair fight anymore. Thanks to vaulting technology, even every lion is now a potential lamb, helpless before our kind. The beasts with natural power to tear apart or trample us have been neutralized. They are victims of a fearful asymmetry, slaughtered more easily than ever before thanks to AK-47s, night-vision goggles, helicopter rampages, sophisticated baiting sounds that mimic their young in distress, and other contrivances that Homo faber alone could have fashioned. Shouldn’t that force imbalance alone render those who wield it more hesitant?

In sum, one does not need to give animals “rights” to see that human beings can do wrong by them. It is rather that we owe them mercy because of the kind of creatures we are — creatures capable of enacting it. The fact that we are the only animals with the power of clemency puts the choice before us constantly, especially since we no longer live in caves or subsist on mammoth meat: demurral, brutality, or mercy?

Any reader who has made it this far in an essay on a subject guaranteed to make most of us uncomfortable will be wondering: What does it all mean for me? There is no one-size-fits-all answer, not in Fear Factories and not here. But there is an analogy that might help: the mind-set that Catholics and other Christians are called to bring to Lent.

In the run-up to each Ash Wednesday, the hunt is on for acts that will make every Christian a better Christian, and the blueprints depend on too many particulars to count. Should you go to Mass more often? Quit drinking, complaining, online shopping, video games — or scrolling? Add extra prayer time? Sign up for the soup kitchen around the corner or enlist in other good works? How best to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and otherwise do what Christians are supposed to do anyway but are trying harder to do during these 40 days? As the list suggests, Lent doesn’t mean throwing in the towel because it’s impossible to be perfectly good. The spirit of the season is exactly the opposite: It’s about spying moral opportunities where others might see nothing but dreary do-nots — including and especially in small things.

Consider that chef in Chicago mentioned earlier. Or the consumers who take time to learn the conditions in which their meat or fish was raised, even if it means paying more for creatures that got to live regular animal lives. Or the fact that ordinary citizens can make opinions known to legislatures, including opinions about animal protection.

There’s also the story of fashion giant Oleg Cassini, told in Fear Factories. A leopard coat he designed for Jacqueline Kennedy became all the rage — so much so that an estimated 250,000 leopards were killed as fashionistas emulated her. A chastened Cassini relays that he was at first unaware of the destruction caused by the fur industry. “Then I began to read some articles. I began to look at the pictures, to see the frightening cruelty.” Finally, in a move that would be followed by other big industry names, he swore off fur and began designing substitutes. “Fur is the most ancient part of the culture, when humans had to protect themselves against the cold and they had to kill to eat. But we are not at that stage anymore. We can choose a different way.”

So we can. That’s the beauty of rising attention to the matter of animal welfare. It’s not about closing people’s mouths. It’s about opening our hearts.

That paradox hanging over the animals, and us, remains. The same force — science — that delivers new and improved weapons to use against the rest of Creation also keeps lifting the veil on what’s inside it: sentient, familial, complicated creatures whose mysterious teleology is more recognizable to us than ever before. For religious believers, a coda all its own suggests itself. Our fellow travelers bear the silent message that even a chronically disordered world is underpinned by natural order — including more order amid the earth’s species than was understood before. The animals, in their infinite complexity and ineradicable need for their own, signal our common origin. They point us toward home.